Around the house

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Thanks to grandpa’s ladder and how long it takes the rice cooker to go, I’ve finally gotten around to hanging some pictures. The seller didn’t bother to remove and patch everything, and as someone who hates hanging stuff: I’ve found the pre-existing points for mounting and hanging stuff especially convenient!

For the living room, I’ve put up three of the four paintings up. Aptly, these are my grandfather’s artistry and it was his ladder that went to the process of putting them up and using a level to get them hanging straight.

In the small framed space by the door, I’ve opted to put one of the christ pictures, since I kind of think of this space as conceptually like a kamidana and the next best candidate is a picture of mom and dad from the ‘60s that is more easily put else where.

I’ve already setup my “Hunting thropy” in the study. At a previous job, when we were cleaning out old office spaces, I had come across a nice framed rendering of one of their early mainframe systems. After helping the facilities guy send more than a few related things to his blue and green offices out back, I opted to keep that for myself instead of seeing it join the refuse. I may include some of my 8” floppy diskettes into the decore as well, but I’m not sure how well they will hold up on my study’s shelves.

Now that I have some awesome nightstands, I’ve taken the time to launder more of my grandmother’s doily’s, so that the tops have an accent that matches my dresser across the room. Being a pain in the ass, I also cut EZ-Liners to protect the drawers. Decided to break out a few of the plastic flowers I had saved from cleaning out my mother’s things, and incorporate these as well to please the eye.

Perhaps, I’m kind of odd. Traditionally, decoration and ornamentation is something that you prioritize showing to other people. Where you lead your guests, usually often get the most attention to decore. I’m not really that way. I don’t tend to have many house guests and have little desire to show off to others. Rather, I choose to focus decorating places that *I will enjoy* and frequent. So, for example my study and bedroom and kitchen have gotten far more prioritization than places like my living and dining room.

Thank GOD, I don’t live next to an IKEA.

Odds, ends, and a varied day

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Today, I decided to take an easier path and go out for some errands and ended up exploring a bit. Sadly, being a stupid schelp, by the time I opted for lunch, I was about ready to chew the steering wheel.

On the positive side I did have a large breakfast, not that my skills at making tamogoyaki are worth much. Finally caving in and buying myself the pan for it after all these years seems to have yielded a superb little all purpose non stick pan with spatchula. Which is nice because making eggs are about the only time I really prefer nonstick style pans, as such most of my other cookware is stainless steel or cast iron.

Sounds like some kind of stone infused non stick coating and an induction pad so it’ll work on any stove top. But really for me, it’s the case that A.) It isn’t a pain to clean after making eggs, B.) It’s probably got more even heat distribution than most of my pots, and C.) the square shape of a tamogoyaki pan can be useful. After quite a few years of going nah, I shouldn’t splurge, or nah, I don’t have cabinet space, I finally said fuck it and indulged in this long term desire. They’re not expensive nor too specialized, but when you have an apartment sized kitchen every square centimeter of storage is precious.

Which reminds me of grandpa’s ladder. For the last 30 years it’s been fairly unnecessary in that the step stool we bought in the 2000s was both tall enough and far easier to store. Let’s just say that it’s been so rarely needed in apartments that it’s more my “Better to have a rope and not need a rope than need a rope and not have it” attitude that’s hung on to it, as I’m a bit less sentimental stuff horder like than my momma was. I’m finding that grandpa’s ladder is quite darn handy to have around a house, where things like ceiling fans, smoke detectors, and light fixtures are often located too high for a simple step stool. And I’m not inclined to tea kettle off a chair either.

Strange definitions of fun

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Decided to take a break from my expedition into Subnatica’s Lost River and break out my old PowerBook Duos. I must have a strange concept of fun.

I’m a little saddened that the Duo 2300c has gone to smear and physical rubber band land while it’s been in storage. But I now know a few things about how it boots. Thanks to Shion unexpectedly being able to mount its drive, I know the system doesn’t boot because the 8.6 install files from Apple’s anthology repo are looking for 8.5 files. Nuts. On the flip side I also learned that plugging in my Duo 230’s drive, that it will boot on the 2300c. Actually runs pretty nice despite it all being emulated, since all the applications on that drive are either for a Motorola 68030 or older, or a fat binary for both.

Given the state of the screen, even if it has a snazzy PowerPC, I opted to swap my memory cards back so that the 230 has 24M of RAM and the 2300c probably has 8M or whatever. At first, after seeing the state of the screen, I decided to try seeing if the touchpad could be swapped. The 2300c and 230 top covers only differ in the labelling and having a trackpad mounted where the cutout for the trackball would go. Sadly, I wasn’t about to use the trackpad, so I swapped these back. I don’t mind the 230’s trackball, so much as it tends to stick or stop sensing the ball rolling no matter what I do to the darn thing. Probably should just buy a Wombat to connect a USB mouse to it.

Interestingly, I also learned that the 2300c mainboard has both its new IDE header and an old SCSI header in exactly the same place as the earlier 230 and its relations. The machines are really, really similar. I’m pretty sure that the only major differences are adapting the chipset to accommodate a PowerPC instead of a Motorola processor. Since the screen is going bad and its keyboard sticks less than the 1992 one, I decided to at least switch out the keyboards so that the 230 has a better typing experience.

Towels redux

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I’m not sure if this is evidence that I have been getting more particular about tidying as I age, or that if I had a wife: she would have buried me in the yard by now for driving her mad with such actions. Also, I blame Google search results and Mari Kondo for inspiring this solution.

Standing towels

The brown towel being used to dry stuff is representative of most of my kitchen towels, basically from the ‘last’ time I had moved. The red was originally meant to rotate with them but rather spent most of its life in my changing closet towel shelf. This time it’s ended up my front line towel for hand washing. I forget how old the white one is, but it was found in the utilities and got a trip through the washer with the rest before being appointed mess duty.

Hmm, this makes me wonder if the coffee tray repurposed from organizing my bathroom counter (drawers ftw!) might make a useful towel wrangling, or if it’s better reserved for my red tea set.

25 years and moving on

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About twenty five years ago, I wondered how well Internet Connection Sharing might work. Well, I did see it work for about 5 minutes until I hit the power cycle test. Then I remembered it’s been that many years without any experience showing that windows should be used as a piece of routing infrastructure.

The first experiment resulted in losing Remote Desktop to Cream and having to fetch an HDMI cable and juggle over my keyboard and mouse. Okay, that’s fair enough, it was a 50/50 shot if I was clicking share on the right interface.

Second experiment actually worked great. Sharing the wireless interface caused Rimuru to gain itself an acceptable DHCP response and route traffic through Cream at 192.168.137.1 and was placed on a similar subnet, complete with access to the one true gateway. Cream’s fan when into hyperdrive but otherwise it was effective.

Third experiment was a fireball. Decided to reboot Cream and verify that it came up, it is my file server after all. At which point everything ceased working and regardless of actions taken, Rimuru can’t get a response from Cream. The only way that Rimuru seems to regain network access through Cream’s Ethernet port is to break out Shion, remote to Cream over the wireless, and toggle the sharing property off and on again on the Wi-Fi interface.

So I think I can say that ICS is a good ad-hoc solution. The kind where you’re in a closet and need an Ethernet to wireless thing and don’t have a Raspberry Pi handy, except most laptops no longer come with wired network adapters. Having failed the great reboot test, I am declaring it ineffective for my purposes versus switching to a mesh network.

Ya know, I’m reminded that letting Cream remain on Windows 10 instead of wiping it out for a load of FreeBSD or Debian was in itself an experiment. Yeah, I guess asking more than Plex and SMB was too much for this experiment. But I suppose I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this little NUC. Even if there’s been plenty of times I’ve wanted to turn it into creamed corn.

Two yeses and a no

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No, I didn’t need to buy new kitchen towels.

Yes, I bought these because they’re pretty.

Yes, all my old kitchen towels are pretty as a brick through a window.

The L-Shaped Beast

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The new desk is now largely operational, although it’s going to be a while before a proper chair mat arrives.

It’s amazing having the room to pull the desk out enough to be able to access cables. Not to mention, you know, having an actual study instead of a tiny ass desk crammed next to a couch or a bed.

I’ve made use of my host of binder clips to help secure cabling and keep it mostly out of sight, while taking advantage of the space to have a much easier time swapping cables between Rimuru (desktop) and Shion (laptop). Unlike my old desk, the monitor arm even has enough room to clamp on the desk instead of getting all edgy, lol.

Amusingly to me, Rimuru doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi despite it being a feature of the replacement motherboard. So for right now the gaming focus will likely remain on Steam Deck. In any case, Shion is happy as a clam and gets decent 5 Ghz everywhere in the building. In the long term, I might see if my aging Asus plays nice with younger models since it supports their mesh mode or just wait until Wi-Fi 7 is a thing.

Anyway, I’ve rather missed having an actual desk space with mouse, monitor, and keyboard. Shion and Nerine serve me well for most computer tasks outside of gaming, but there are times where the dire lack of places to sit and work is irksome. For bonus points the L-shaped beast provides ample room for all my stuff and provides a similar layout to my space at work.

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Watching this, I’m reminded that Caroline is both crazy and awesome.

Also the beginning of the video is pretty damned perfect.

It also covers quite a few areas, worth watching IMHO. Different people will react in different ways and pressure points when living alone, like for example one of mine is the side effect of having to do everything yourself. It causes me to put more focus on cutting up house work into smaller tasks and in my experience, often makes for more negativity when life is closer to hurricane mode than pouring.

Actually, this reminds me: I should probably buy some shorts for working around the house 😅.

Fine print

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In taking a gander at the fine print on my home insurance, I’m honestly not sure if it’s genius or horrifying, some of the details that have been encoded about the perils insured against and those excluded. In any case, I’m really glad it covers the things I’d be interested in, and that I didn’t grow up to be a claims agent or something like that because I’d go crazy Catch-22 style.

For example, if a passing drone was to malfunction and fire off an anti-tank missile at the dwelling, this should be covered in the sense of ‘Aircraft’ including both space craft and self propelled missiles and other text on the subject. But pretty much anything that can be construed as an act of war is not, so if it was an invading power or civil war instead of a accident the insurance company could say tough.

And then there’s the whole definition that the discharge of a nuclear weapon is excluded and even an accidental discharge of a nuke will be considered a war like act for insurance purposes. On one hand, I’m not sure you can blame folks for encoding that in a policy this side of the Cuban missile crisis but on the other hand, I kind of giggle snorted from the horror. But to be fair while “Explosions” are an insured against peril, a nuclear discharge may be a bit much. Also I’d like to think most people would have bigger problems in the event of such an incident than filing claims.

I can never tell if the world is better or worse off that I can’t doodle the strange and random funny junk that my mind can visualize…..

Breakfast for dinner and gas on the range

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After executing breakfast for dinner, I’m reminded that if I ever had to teach someone to cook, why I’d use eggs as an early lesson: they’re easy. Also reminded that a tamogoyaki pan has been on my wish list for quite a few years now, and that making eggs are one of the few times that I prefer non-stick cookware.

Pretty much if you can avoid putting egg shells in then pan: you can scramble or fry eggs. Quality may vary wildly between how fluffy and rubber like they turn out, but by and large they’re idiot proof. About the time they’ve started coagulating you probably hit temperature enough for them to be relatively safe to eat, and a new cook is more likely to overcook eggs and have to scrub the pan than they are to generate food poisoning from overly runny eggs. Making eggs are pretty tolerant of being cooked quickly at high heat or slower at low heat, and coagulate rapidly enough that it’s a good lesson in “Hey kiddo, don’t walk off while you’re cooking!” Plus if you add enough cheese, you’ll probably have something edible unless you chip a tooth 😅

Having spent a life around electric ranges, I’m beginning to understand why my mother and most folks I’ve known prefer gas stoves. At first it felt like relearning how to boil and simmer all over but I greatly appreciated the speed savings for making pasta, my first home cooked meal here. The rapid heat control is rather nice for making eggs, especially if you tend to favor the hot and fast approach to scrambling. Making me happy that my first eggs cooked on gas came out both nice and quickly. Plus, compared to the stoves my mother described (or worse, learned to cook on back in the ’50s), any gas range made in this millennium is an auto igniting electric. So even a schmuck like me can use one, lol.